Question

WHile I am a programmer, I’ve never played with sharepoint before. At our company, we just started using Sharepoint. We have some Sharepoint alerts created to send out wiki page change notices. However, when the wiki page is very complex, it is difficult to see exactly what changed.

Is it possible to write a plugin for the Sharepoint server to only send the added/modified/removed lines in an alerts?

How would I get started to write such a module?

Any plugin samples or coding guidelines to follow?

Answer 1

You need to create a feature to add an event receiver to the Wiki list:

• Add Event Receivers to SharePoint 2010 Lists
• How to: Create an Event Handler Feature

SPItemEventReceiver has a number of virtual methods corresponding to the lifecycle stages of a list item (i.e. a Wiki article in your case). The one you need to override is ItemUpdated – put the code responsible for detecting the changes and sending the email notifications there.

Since you’re new to SharePoint development, I have one more general advice for you – SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 are very different from a developer’s perspective, so make sure to use Visual Studio 2010 (it offers: “F5 debugging” for SharePoint applications, templates for projects and project items, integration of SharePoint into Server Explorer, and more) and stay away from old discussions and blog posts (e.g. if you read that you should use a tool called WSPBuilder, stop reading).